This disclosure relates generally to systems and methods for detecting defects in aircraft wiring, and more particularly, to systems and methods for detecting partial discharges or arcing in wiring or cables.
Wiring is a critical system in aircraft, shipboard, industry and home applications. Aircraft wiring integrity and safety related issues are known to be serious and have received a great deal of interest after the Swissair 111 and TWA 800 accidents. Also, electrical fires in industry account for a large portion of property loss, and electrical fires in the home is a significant portion of the fires occurring in the home that threaten life and damage property.
Aircraft wiring insulation is much thinner than that found in building wiring in order to reduce weight. This thin insulation deteriorates with age due to changes in chemical composition, vibration during flights, large temperature changes, and exposure to agents such as dust, salt, moisture and cleaning chemicals. This wiring is also exposed to other mechanical stresses during maintenance. The aforementioned effects will degrade the insulation, causing cracks and chafing. These insulation defects can cause arcing between wires or surrounding metals. Humidity together with salt and dust depositions can make the arc creation more probable.
The detection of aircraft wiring defects is primarily performed by visual inspection by maintenance personnel. This manual inspection is a slow process and its reliability is not satisfactory. Furthermore, as it requires twisting the wiring in order to check chafing, this visual inspection often causes more problems than it can identify. Therefore, a need exists for techniques, to detect defects in wiring or cables, that can be perform by other than visual inspection and will not cause further degradation to the wire or cable under test.
Partial discharge signal detection can be used to characterize the condition of wiring. If a partial discharge occurs, the discharge will generate high frequency electrical signals traveling along the cable. This high frequency electrical signal can be detected with high frequency current transformers (HFCTs). The commercially available current transformers are typically large and heavy and can not be used for aircraft wiring monitoring as a permanently installed sensor.